Dev Watercooler: Seeing the Forest for the Talent Trees

Following the release of the updated Mists of Pandaria talent calculator yesterday, Ghostcrawler explains some of the changes in today's Dev Watercooler. Without sugarcoating things, he talks about why the old talent system was fundamentally flawed and addresses player concerns like how it seems the new system presents fewer choices or emphasizes PvP abilities.

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on our crazy, exciting, and scary talent overhaul, for which we are enormously appreciative. For real and for true. We *want* your feedback on the new talents. That is why we are presenting so much detail so early. While we will continue to iterate on talent specifics, your feedback is an important part of that process. Don’t abstain because you’re convinced that things will change without you. Your input is one of our most important tools for improving the game.

We have seen a few consistent responses from players concerned or dismissive about the model, so we thought we’d take the opportunity to explain the philosophy behind some of our decisions, to provide a better framework upon which you can continue giving us feedback.

1. "I have fewer choices."

This is the big one, and the truth is it is ultimately correct. You will have fewer choices. But you will have more choices that *matter*. One of the important philosophies of game design is that interesting choices are fun. The word ‘interesting’ is key. Choosing between a talent that grants 10% damage and one that grants 5% damage, all else being equal, isn't interesting (unless perhaps you’re a superstar role-player). Choosing between a talent that grants you 5% haste or 5% crit might be interesting, but more than likely there is still a right answer (and like most of us, you'll probably just ask someone else what the answer is.) Choosing between a talent that grants you a root or a snare can be interesting. Which does more damage? Hard to say. Which is better? It depends on the situation.

This is why we don't have a clear damage, tanking, and healing talent choice every tier. In the case of the old trees, choosing the talent you want from among the talents that don’t interest you isn’t an interesting decision -- it's a multiple choice test, and an easy one at that. Are you Ret? You probably want the damage option. But what if the Ret player had to choose from three healing talents and couldn't sacrifice healing for damage? Now it gets interesting. Worst case scenario is the player just picks one at random because he refuses to heal. However, he has the ability. Maybe he'll use it in some situation. Meanwhile, other players will be happy that they can benefit more from the hybrid nature of the paladin class without having to give up damage to do so.

2. "There weren't cookie cutter builds."

You're wrong. Next!

To be fair, we did manage to engineer most of the Cataclysm talent trees to include a few legitimate choices. These typically occur when you need to spend enough points to get to the next tier of a tree to get the good stuff. Many specs had 1-4 points to spend wherever they want. That's a huge victory compared to pre-Cataclysm talent trees, but ultimately nothing to really brag about.

It is possible of course to strike a blow for individuality and use a non-cookie cutter build. Ninety-nine percent of the time, these builds are just going to be less effective. The remaining percent of the time, they will eventually become the new cookie-cutter. When players talk about their love of options, I think what they are really saying is they are in love with the idea of having dozens of interesting talents. We just don't think that will ever happen.

Look, we tried the talent tree model for seven years. We think it’s fundamentally flawed and unfixable. We know some of you have faith in us that someday we’ll eventually replace all of the boring +5% crit talents with interesting talents and give you 80 talent points that you can spend wherever, and that the game will still remain relatively balanced and fun. We greatly appreciate your faith, but we fear it is misplaced. It’s not a matter of coming up with enough fun mechanics, which is challenging but ultimately doable. The problem is the extreme number of combinations. When you have such a gigantic matrix, the chances of having unbeatable synergies, or combinations of talents that just don’t work together is really high. That’s not lazy design. That is recognizing how math works.

So given that we don’t think it’s humanly possible to have 40-50 fun, interesting and balanced talents in a tree, the alternative is to continue on with bloated trees that have a ton of inconsequential talents that you have to slog through to get to the fun stuff. A lot of you guys have stuck with us for years, continue to play regularly, and still love World of Warcraft. You are the reason we’re still making this game. We think you deserve better, and we think we can do better.

3. "We'll still have cookie-cutter builds with the new design."

I am slightly amused by the number of comments that say "The theorycrafters will just math out which is the right talent and we'll all just pick that one." But the theorycrafters aren’t agreeing with those comments, because they know they won’t be able to.

Just to make sure, I chose several specs at random and researched their builds. Sure enough, even with the Cataclysm builds today, you see quotes like “spend the last two points wherever you want” or “choose X or Y at your discretion.” It is “easy” (which I put in quotes because theorycrafters devote a lot of time and neurons to it) to determine the value of a DPS talent like Incite or Ignite. It is hard to determine the DPS value of Improved Sprint or Lichborne. Most of the Mists talents are things like the latter. Now there are still some pure throughput (damage, healing, or tanking) talents in the trees. We expect there will sometimes be a right answer as to which talent to take for those roles. On a fight like Baelroc (one boss, no adds), Bladestorm and Shockwave probably aren't competitive with Avatar. We're okay with that, because on Beth'tilac (lots of adds) they definitely can be and it will depend a lot on your play style and the role you have in the fight. However, given that we know a player can only have one of those three talents and that the synergistic effects from those talents with other talents are limited, it is much easier for us to balance say the healing value of Archangel and Divine Star. Despite what you read on the forums, we actually have gotten better at balancing World of Warcraft over the years.

4. "No rewards for leveling."

Once upon a time, you got a new talent point every level. That worked okay for a game with 60 levels. It works less well for a game with 90 levels. It probably is totally incomprehensible for a game with 150 levels, should we ever get there. We keep bumping the level cap because frankly it’s fun and we haven’t yet come up with a progression mechanism that will feel quite as good.

Leveling is pretty fast these days and fairly rewarding, in that you see lots of new content and get gear quickly, which is something we have trouble replicating at max level (though stay tuned for Mists of Pandaria). On top of that, you’ll still get lots of abilities as you level up. Instead of having to click Raging Blow, we’ll just give it to you, because frankly if you skip it, you’re making a mistake (or you’re RPing a Fury warrior who has taken too many blows to the head). There are gaps in getting new abilities, especially at high level, because we don’t want players to have to have four rows of action bars to play their character. Again, that is just the blessing and curse of having a game with so many levels.

Third, I’ll challenge the notion of just how interesting it is to get that second point in Pain and Suffering or Rule of Law while leveling. Do you really notice that you now kill a creature in 2.9 GCDs instead of 3 GCDs? (But see below for a bit more on this.) There are some game-challenging talents of course, like Shadowform, but as we just discussed, you'll still get those.

Finally, the reality is that for many players, WoW has become a game focused on max level. Back in the day, leveling a fleet of alts was really compelling gameplay, but for many of the old-timers, there just isn’t a ton of interest in making a second mage or whatever. Hopefully account-level achievements will help with that somewhat, but at the same time, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect all of our long-term players to have thirty or more characters at some point in the future. It’s a fair concern that the new talent system is geared more towards making max level exciting, but that’s also where players tend to spend most of their WoW-playing hours these days. We don’t know yet what we are going to do for players who want to play a monk but just can’t stomach the idea of hitting Hellfire Peninsula one more time, and how we solve the problem when you get a friend to try WoW, only to discover that your pal will need to spend several weeks or months getting up to max level before he or she is ready to join your Arena team or raid group. But these feel like problems we are going to have to solve at some point.

5. "I like being better than noobs."

It was surprising and a bit disappointing at how frequently we saw this argument. The players in question fully admit that they don't experiment to find the best build. They accept the cookie cutter spec that is offered from a website, but then they use the fact that they knew the cookie cutter to mock players who don't. Intimate knowledge of game mechanics certainly is and should be a component of skill. But knowing how to Google "4.3 Shadow spec" doesn't automatically make you a better player. Sorry, but I’m just going to dismiss this one as an illegitimate concern.

6. "The talents are all PvP choices."

We see this response from players who say “I don’t care about PvP,” or “raid bosses can’t be snared,” or even “I am a solo player, so I don’t need a defensive cooldown.”

First, a lot of players do care about PvP, and almost every choice in the new talent model will be interesting for them. We are also taking some steps with Mists to encourage more crossover between PvP and PvE as the game once had, so even if you don’t care for PvP now, maybe we can get you interested in the future.

Second, a lot of raid bosses can’t be snared, but their adds and trash sure can be. We don’t do a lot of Patchwerk fights these days. Crowd control, movement increases, and defensive cooldowns are all an important part of raid encounters these days. They are even a part of dungeon encounters until you overgear the content.

Now if you're a solo player or a fairly casual raider and you don't often find the need to use crowd control or hit a defensive cooldown, then maybe the choice isn't compelling. But we think that's a problem with the game. I think it’s a fair complaint that our outdoor world creatures have become a little monotonous over the years. Once upon a time, you could choose to take on that camp of gnolls, or you could try and handle the elite ogres, or you might get a patrolling kobold. While we don’t want outdoor leveling to be brutally difficult, that doesn’t mean that every situation needs to be solved with 3 Sinister Strikes. Imagine a cave full of weak spiders. You can choose to AE them all down, use a movement cooldown to get through the cave quickly, use a defensive cooldown to survive the damage, or use your heals to keep you up. When players use their full toolbox of abilities intelligently, they tend to feel good about their character and the game. But it is our responsibility to engineer more of those situations into the world.

7. "Spec doesn’t matter."

This is a concern especially for warriors, priests, DKs and the pure classes (those characters who have multiple specs of the same role). What we have concluded is that many players want to choose their spec based on flavor (“I want to be the mage who uses Frost magic”) or rotation (“I like the fast gameplay of the Frost DK”). While the raid buff / debuff matrix and spec utility helps to encourage diversity among groups and discourage raid stacking, it’s also a little lame when the Affliction lock is asked to spec Demonology (against the player’s desire) in order to bring a specific buff. In Mists, we want players to have even more flexibility about which character they want to play. Asking a player to swap from damage to tanking for a couple of fights is acceptable to us. Asking someone to respec from Unholy to Frost just for the debuff is not.

There will still be some utility in the various specs, but less than we have today. You should pick a spec because you like the rotation or the kit. Fire is about crit, Hot Streak, and Ignite. Frost is about Shatter combos and the Water Elemental. Arcane is about mana management and clearing Arcane Blast stacks.

8. “It must be new to be good.”

This is a tricky one. Specifically, the warlock and druid trees include a lot of new talent ideas simply because we felt like those classes needed them. While we want to make an effort to add some new mechanics every expansion just to keep things fresh, we don’t want to arbitrarily replace fun talents that have stood the test of time just in the name of change for change’s sake. Bladestorm is fun. Body and Soul is fun. Shadowstep is fun.

From a designer’s perspective, the half-life of a new spell or talent idea is fleetingly short. You know how when you buy a new car and drive it off the lot it immediately loses a huge chunk of its value? New game ideas are like that. Seeing something brand new is super exhilarating, but that thrill just doesn’t last. I suspect even by the time Mists launches, we will see a lot of comments along the lines of “When are druids going to get something new? We haven’t seen any new ideas since November!”

It isn’t our goal to come up with 18 new talents for every class. We want to come up with 18 fun talents, and that’s going to mean a mix of old and new. Try not to confuse “shiny” with “good,” and we’ll try on our end not to fall into that trap as well.

This is another tricky issue, because neither extreme (stagnation versus constant design churn) is appealing, and every individual player (and designer!) has a different definition of where those extremes lie. We changed talent trees in Cataclysm to try and fix some of the underlying problems the talent design had since its inception. We actually considered going to the Mists model for Cataclysm, but we were worried that the change would be too shocking to players, so we went with a more restrained design first. As often happens with compromises, it didn’t fix the underlying problems. Our hope is that this new design solves them once and for all. That isn’t a promise to not change talents for 6.0, 7.0, and beyond. But we hope that an overhaul this drastic isn’t necessary again for a long time to come.

MMOs are inherently living designs that are going to change over time. This is particularly true of subscription models, where players rightly expect to see something for their monthly payment. We don’t think it’s fair to cling to designs that aren’t working just because that’s the design we shipped with. As we have discussed a great deal lately, we will try to limit our big design changes to new expansions, but it’s just not in our DNA to leave something at a B- level if we think we can make it A+.

10. “You’ve got your minds made up and don’t care about what we think.”

You’re wrong. Next!

As I have said a million times, good games (maybe good anything) can’t be designed by popular vote. Our design feedback process is about making informed decisions. The developers will make the decisions we feel are right for the game, but we’ll do that armed with the feedback from players about what is fun and not fun for them. If you want to provide the best feedback possible, try to be succinct (we get a lot of feedback), try to be specific (why don’t you like something), and don’t assume you speak for everyone (game design, like art, is often subjective). Don’t get upset if we don’t implement your idea -- that’s just not a realistic expectation. Don’t confuse the echo chamber phenomenon that can occur in forum discussions for consensus. Most importantly, try to remember what will be fun for everyone, and not just your character.

Soon -- TM.

One more thing to keep in mind: Playing with the new talent system in-game is really different from choosing talents on “paper.” Some of the decisions we made didn’t come about until we could get into the game and see how leveling and playing actually felt. Once we’re in alpha, many of you guys will be able to give us some more concrete feedback. We understand that, and we’re pushing for doing that just as soon as we can. In the meantime, enjoy the Hour of Twilight.

*Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. He role-plays a Fury warrior who has taken too many blows to the head.

Commenti

Commento di Adamsm

Oh GC, wrong term; so many are going to see only that and use it as a reason to flame and bash, without reading the rest of the article....

That said, I like it; matches with most of what I've been thinking in regards to the Mists talents, so nice to know.

Commento di Rankkor

on 2011-12-08T11:38:26-06:00

I'm still not 100% sold on this new talent tree thingie, but with enough polish I may even grow to like it.

As others have said before, ANYTHING is better than what we currently have.

Commento di Nulgar

on 2011-12-08T12:01:39-06:00

You’re wrong. Next!

Oh GC, wrong term; so many are going to see only that and use it as a reason to flame and bash, without reading the rest of the article....

Though they would react the same way to any reply other than "ohmygod you're right, so sorry, gonna fix that right away to your liking"

Commento di Sensorium

on 2011-12-08T12:03:03-06:00

The way I see it, Blizzard knows players are going to be whining about the new trees for a good amount time. However they also know that eventually players will just get used to it and stop the whining because blizzard WONT change the talents back to the way to the way they were before.

You’re wrong. Next!

As I have said a million times, good games (maybe good anything) can’t be designed by popular vote. Our design feedback process is about making informed decisions. The developers will make the decisions we feel are right for the game, but we’ll do that armed with the feedback from players about what is fun and not fun for them. If you want to provide the best feedback possible, try to be succinct (we get a lot of feedback), try to be specific (why don’t you like something), and don’t assume you speak for everyone (game design, like art, is often subjective). Don’t get upset if we don’t implement your idea -- that’s just not a realistic expectation. Don’t confuse the echo chamber phenomenon that can occur in forum discussions for consensus. Most importantly, try to remember what will be fun for everyone, and not just your character.

This pretty much says it all. "Lol screw popular vote, but yeah sure we'll listen to the feedback on what you kids like and dont like, but we're still screwing with the talents. After all, WE KNOW whats best for you. OH and those people on the forums that don't like them? they don't know what they are talking about, don't listen to them. You mad brah?"

Seriously, what problems are there with these talent trees that are so bad that we need to overhaul them every expansion? There really is nothing wrong with them. Stop screwing with it.

Commento di Adamsm

on 2011-12-08T12:05:24-06:00

Seriously, what problems are there with these talent trees that are so bad that we need to overhaul them every expansion? There really is nothing wrong with them. Stop screwing with it.

Well other then useless talents, talents that don't make a lot of sense, and things that are no brainers in regards to picking them.

Commento di Sweetscot

on 2011-12-08T12:13:07-06:00

Is this impassioned piece of nothing supposed to make me like the talent overhaul? If so it didn't work.

Commento di Sensorium

on 2011-12-08T12:15:34-06:00

Seriously, what problems are there with these talent trees that are so bad that we need to overhaul them every expansion? There really is nothing wrong with them. Stop screwing with it.

Well other then useless talents, talents that don't make a lot of sense, and things that are no brainers in regards to picking them.

Then take them out/update/replace them with something else.. Don't totally screw with the whole system, tweeks are fine, but totally scrapping the system and replacing it is unnecessary.

Commento di kmcmann

on 2011-12-08T12:18:13-06:00

I don't mind seeing a bit of change, but the new system seems way overboard.

I like the idea of selecting between options that are not straight-forward for every playstyle. However, the system as currently proposed seems to offer no options for playstyle at all. What I'd like to see would be the same simplified concept, but with a separate tree for each spec. So say for a healer, your options select between a very strong heal slow heal, or a very fast weak heal, or a HoT. Same for DPS: big slow cast damage, little instant-cast damage damage, or a DoT.

I'd much prefer that to being a healer and having to choose between 3 different options that have no effect on my healing. I feel as though I'll just be choosing something at random because a choice has to be made, and not because it's something I'll ever want or use.

Commento di Adamsm

on 2011-12-08T12:19:32-06:00

Then take them out/update/replace them with something else.. Don't totally screw with the whole system, tweeks are fine, but totally scrapping the system and replacing it is unnecessary.

Which is what is happening with the change to Spec; you get the passive abilities, the no-brainer abilities, and the duh abilities as you level, while the Talents you choose are up to you.

Commento di yukonjack

on 2011-12-08T12:42:44-06:00

First, a lot of players do care about PvP, and almost every choice in the new talent model will be interesting for them. We are also taking some steps with Mists to encourage more crossover between PvP and PvE as the game once had, so even if you don’t care for PvP now, maybe we can get you interested in the future.

There is the real problem with talent trees, trying to balance around a poorly concocted stew of pve and pvp. LIke chili con carne and lemon grass soup the two will never taste right mixed together.

Also why force a crossover if a player likes either pve or pvp so be it. You can lead a player to a bg but ya cant make me fight.

Commento di DartVader

on 2011-12-08T12:45:45-06:00

Honestly, I like the new talent system. If there's one thing I'm confused about, though, it's how they seem to be completely re-designing warlocks. They've always been built around their DOTs, and that seems to be changing- at least for the Demonology and Destruction specs. Still, as they've said, everything is still unfinished, so I'll withhold any final judgements until I actually have the chance to try them out in the beta as opposed to just looking at them on paper. The thing i'm most psyched about, though,is how DK's are getting Corpse Explosion back! My favorite ability- with Army of the Dead being a close 2nd

Commento di the8thark

on 2011-12-08T12:53:46-06:00

This guy is pretty good. And I am really digging what he says. Also I do agree with most if what he says. But on one point he does contradict himself.

Firstly he says this (about talents):

This is the big one, and the truth is it is ultimately correct. You will have fewer choices. But you will have more choices that *matter*. One of the important philosophies of game design is that interesting choices are fun.

But then he says this (about general abilities):

Instead of having to click Raging Blow, we’ll just give it to you, because frankly if you skip it, you’re making a mistake (or you’re RPing a Fury warrior who has taken too many blows to the head). There are gaps in getting new abilities, especially at high level, because we don’t want players to have to have four rows of action bars to play their character. Again, that is just the blessing and curse of having a game with so many levels.

So he's saying, "we want you to have interesting choices in talents, but we give you no choice in the general abilities you use. We give them to you and expect you to use them regardless.

So it's adding in talent choices (which I like) and removing ability choices (which I do not like). I quite like having lots of abilities to chose from in combat. it makes it fun So Mr Ghostcrawler needs to think about things a touch more to make sure he's he's not giving with one hand and taking from the other (or in other words being a slight hypocrite)

**********************

A lot of people are saying (even in the comments here) why screw with the talent trees, leave them as be? I will tell you why I think they should be changed.The talent trees in vanilla/TBC/Wrath were very good. I liked the option of hybrid specs and a few different options in the trees. But the downside was 90% of the talents for each spec was a must take. So it was just pick a spec you like and blindly put in the talent point it says each level. And you get 5-10 (at max in wrath) talent points to fiddle with. In essence it worked. But it did allow combinations to be over powered or underpowered. And few in between. For all purposes though it sort of worked. Not perfect but ok. If you liked almost zero talent point choice.

The Cata talent trees in my opinion are a total mess. The less said about them the better. Those shortened trees were pretty much each class/spec had one build. And there was literally zero room for customisation. Either you went the course and picked the exact same talent tree as every other person in your spec or you went different and got a spec that was supremely under powered. Zero choice. And at times also being forced to choose filler talents to get to other good ones. in an ideal world there would be zero filler talents cause they would all be interesting and good. But cata did not do this. A massive step backwards this is from the wrath talent trees.

The Panderia talent choices. Not really a tree anymore. Pretty much the same thing as Diablo 3 is doing. Every so many levels pick one of 3 talents. This we all know by now. I really like this. And I really like Blizzard's reasoning about it. Do you want to be a tank that does a little more dps? Then pick Avatar or bladestorm instead of shockwave. But if you need the frontal cone stun then take shockwave. A lot more choice then the talent trees ever had. This also filters down to to boss fights and arenas. In good and not so good ways.

In arenas: You won't know what abilities your opponents have. You can usually pick their spec by their buffs and equipped weapons. But in Panderia you won't know what exact talents they have. So you will have to make your arena spec in such a fashion to expect anything. Which I really like. This makes arenas a lot more interesting.

Boss Fights: Yes you can have different abilities for the fights now. Which is good. And as Ghostcrawler said, some fights tent towards one ability choice over another. Avatar, Shockwave and Bladestorm will each work better in different fights. That is nice. The downside? People will ask "we want warrior tank with bladestorm" for example. People will not take classes anymore. They will look in their raid set up. And not say hmmm a warrior will do. They'll say we want 1x bladestorm, 1x killing spree, 2x vamperic dominance etc etc in the raid. This totally goes against the "bring the player and not thew class to raids" mantra they are pushing.

So what is the solution to this? You make all the abilities just about as good as each other in terms of dps and functionality. Yes this requires very good balancing skills. And Blizzard's past balancing skills are questionable at best. But I have to agree less options does equal easier to balance all the combinations of those options. So hopefully Panderia is much better balanced.

This boss issue also can lead into arena if people want their partners to have specific abilities. But it's not as worry some as for raiding. Cause most people have a 2nd PvP spec. This is assuming dual spec is still in Panderia.

**********************

Lastly the general abilities in Panderia. in Wrath you went and purchased them all. And it really felt nice to have all these options to use. Going up and buying all the different levels felt very good. It did nothing in terms of gameplay though. Having the ability self level up as the character does is the same thing. But just not as satisfying.

And being told what abilities we must use (according to the above quote I made in this post) is just not cool. It's like Blizzard said "We will work the abilities everyone used in their max dps rotations" and anything that didn't cut the best mustard according to sites like Tankspot and ElitestJerks will get removed from the game. This really feels like what Blizzard is doing. And this is something I don't like.

There are gaps in getting new abilities, especially at high level, because we don’t want players to have to have four rows of action bars to play their character. Again, that is just the blessing and curse of having a game with so many levels.

Ghostcrawler saying this proves he does not get it. Which is surprising cause most of his writings show he does get it. So this little quote is very out of character for him. I've played every class a human can be. And played them a lot. And of all those classes/specs all bar one had 1-2 at max action bars. My Prot Warrior with engineering (for bombs, hand cannon and belt bombs all also on the action bar) and my raid "taunt this" macro and one on use trinket fits into 2.5 action bars. The standard one + the top left and a little of the top right. The rest of the top right one is filled with my favourite mounts. Every other class/spec I've used I hardly fill up 2 action bars. So saying you need 3-4 action bar rows for combat is just crazy. One of the less intelligent ideas/comments from Ghostcrawler. I think the number of abilities in Wrath and Cata were fine. People back in wrath days did complain bear tanks were severly lacking in the number of usable abilities. But Blizzard tried to fix this in cata. So it's not to bad.

(continued in next post)

Commento di the8thark

on 2011-12-08T12:55:02-06:00

(Continued from previous post)

My point? Don't take away the number of abilities each class has. Don't give us a lot of cool talent choices in one hand and take away all the good abilities in the other hand. People want more then the absolute minimum number of abilities for the max dps rotation. And as you know each patch (with the nerfs and buffs to classes) what the best spec and rotation always changes. So having those other abilities there is good.

Commento di Adamsm

on 2011-12-08T13:01:46-06:00

Pretty much all of the original 'pick this because it makes sense' talents from the current trees are learned as you level depending on the spec you pick at level 10: Ghostwolves, Titan's Grip, Metamorph, Bestial Wrath, etc etc. They are still there, they just aren't part of the talent trees anymore.

Commento di keyur

on 2011-12-08T13:08:39-06:00

I am happy with this new idea of talent tree but still I feel pity and injustice for few classes. They said about interesting choices but its feel like they are taking something from me.

Commento di Raihley

on 2011-12-08T15:54:50-06:00

...Going up and buying all the different levels felt very good. It did nothing in terms of gameplay though. Having the ability self level up as the character does is the same thing. But just not as satisfying.

I personally think that buying each spell-rank (sometimes even more than a dozen) was pointless, expensive and non-sense.By the way, I also believe that learning the actual spell automatically is not fun and non "satisfying" at all.

People want more then the absolute minimum number of abilities for the max dps rotation. And as you know each patch (with the nerfs and buffs to classes) what the best spec and rotation always changes. So having those other abilities there is good.

First of all, you are speaking for yourself (as of course am I), so just don't think yourself as the people representative.

Second, this writing of yours is quite pointless I fear:- Talking only about PvE in general, what's the point in having spells you will never use? None, I suppose. If I'm a fire mage, I will never miss having Arcane Blast on my cast-bar, since it has never been there (while playing fire, obviously). While I'm not referring (carrying on the mage class as an example) to most of the utility spells such as Esplosione Gelida or (which are rightly considered "class spell" rather than "spec spells"), I truly can't see any situation when you can actually choose the spell to use in place of the spell already meant to be used: if I play fire, my main nuke is never going to be anything but Palla di Fuoco (or Palla di Fuocogelo). - Also in PvP why should I ever want to use a spell for which I have an equivalent from my current spec? I think if I wanted to use another spell, I might want to consider to change spec.- So what's the point in having currently useless spells? Just because it feels good? Just to have it in your spellbook? To see your cast bar full of different colours? I don't see it. You want to use another school of spell? Change spec. (I understand the mage is a bit extreme as an example, since its spells are quite streamlined depending on the spec).

What they need to do, and it's quite challenging, is to balance the specs and the talents so that you have free choices (which is not easy).

And as you know each patch (with the nerfs and buffs to classes) what the best spec and rotation always changes. So having those other abilities there is good.

This is simply false: the rotation can rarely change with patches update (not expansions), but you are really unlikely to start using a spell you were not before (in fact, you are never going to do so, unless they tried to fix some major problem with the class).From what you said, I (as a fire mage) should be afraid of loosing Detonazione Arcana from my cast bar, because I might some day need it as a part of my fire rotation...

In addiction, should someone argue that this is really based on PvE, I'd say that you shouldn't have a rotation in PvP...

So it's adding in talent choices (which I like) and removing ability choices (which I do not like).

Really, we cant' consider the spells listed on the official page as all of them; it's just not possible if you look at some classes. Some spells are missing, some are to be added as brand knew: we can't say (for example) that fire mages are loosing Blast Wave just because it was a talent since the previous update of the MoP talent calculator and now it's missing; it's all work in progress. So, from this prospective, how can you say we are loosing abilities choices?On the other hand, as I wrote above, have you an actual full choice of spell when you choose a spec (as the system stands today)? No. You are using certain spells, and not thinking about what to use and what not.

I see, what you meant, even if it might not look so: the point is that the loosing of“ability choices“ cannot be confirmed on the one hand at the moment, and, on the other, I still can't see why you should ever find yourself in the need of using a spell from a different spec, which is not a utility "class spell" available to all specs, when you have an equivalent/something-else to compensate it from your current spec.

Commento di madcowmike

on 2011-12-08T16:27:29-06:00

This article got me thinking and one thing I think would be great is if we no longer had pre-made specs, but rather chose our moves out of a max number, kind of like Guild Wars, so we could have a decent number of important choices to make and could make hybrids or pure builds work. As GC says, picking a 5% buff to one stat or another is boring, but picking new abilities is fun! I know there might be some who would say this would lead right back to too many choices and the possibility of cookie-cutter builds, but I disagree. I think that this would allow for the customization people are crying for, without the boredom of the old "this buff vs that buff" choices in other talent trees. Having a tank/healer hybrid would be crazy fun. Having a Rogue who was good at initiating like subtlety but focused mostly on poisons for dps would be fun too. Having a truly balanced druid who could perform most roles on the fly (to a lesser effect) would be quite compelling too. Especially when fights are hard enough to kill a few members. And there would be no wasted talents. Everything would be either a pure build pick, (as some elitists would prefer) or a hybrid pick (which has been proven to be just as useful in the hands of a skilled player). So the real question is back to the synergy matrix question. I say that there is little that could not be fixed with a few number crunches. If the moves are built attuned for pure builds like they are today, but we allowed for choice, then we would have at worst the current builds as the "OP" synergies. The key would be to make every move for a tree cause the character to be more effective in the role of that tree. An off tank prot warrior with whirlwind might help with the dps but he would suffer some tankiness he would have gotten from Shield Block for instance. A Prot pally with holy light might be capable to heal himself or the healer in a pinch, but would have to use one of his move slots on it. I fully admit this would be yet another huge shift, and one we are probably not yet ready to handle, but I feel that ultimately it is a great idea that deserves at least some further looking into.

Commento di Interest

on 2011-12-08T17:00:41-06:00

Baelroc

I lol'd.

In response to the article, while most of it does ring true, some of seems overcritical (I'm pretty sure at least SOME theorycrafters are actually trying to cookie cut the @#$% out of this, for instance, in answer 3).

5. "I like being better than noobs."

Really? I don't actually see the argument THAT much.

Commento di LordBalrog

on 2011-12-08T17:18:36-06:00

/yawn Still just killing time until SWTOR Early Access starts ...

Commento di aldenpark

on 2011-12-08T17:47:29-06:00

I've often though that the only way WoW will come down is if it destroys itself and this is a classic example of how blizzard thinks that this new talent system is going to fix things while yet again ignoring that people are still complaining. This is not the fix, this is just the same rhetoric blizzard said a year ago and they will end up again changing things. Frankly I loved the old system and if people want to use a cookie cutter build then so what, add to the system then default builds for those who don't want to screw with there talents.